entropy bound

Milestone

2010-10-14T10:42:00.003-04:00

It's very exciting to hear that the LHC has exceeded the "10³²" milestone already. While this is an important step on the way to the luminosity goals for the first two years at the LHC, it's particularly important as a step on the way to...heavy ions (collisions of fully-stripped lead ions) at the LHC.

This is not exactly for technical reasons, per se. Instead, the LHC heavy ion program was scheduled to happen only if the LHC reached 10³² this year. If they didn't then it was always possible that the program would be shortened, or even cancelled (chilling as that seemed). Fortunately this did not happen, so onward we go into November! See you all at CERN.

90-50-10 (Evolution of a design)

2010-06-10T13:20:00.005-04:00

I'm at the "90-50-10" celebration at BNL now, honoring the 90th birthday of Ernest Courant, 50 years of the AGS, and 10 years of RHIC. Quite an impressive lineup, with 5 Nobel Prize winners in the audience and several speaking as well. It's hard to overstate the importance of Courant's work in the 1950's, which allowed the develop of modern accelerators, both fixed target and colliders.

I had an amusing role in helping design the logo for the event, when I proposed a poster idea (OK, this was the second draft..):

which ended up looking like this in the end:

I still like the original idea, but it's flattering that it survived as much as it did. Anyway, I'll report a bit more on the talks later (maybe much later, but I promise!)

RHIC AGS Users Meeting 2010

2010-06-10T09:35:00.001-04:00

RHIC AGS Users Meeting 2010

Hot v. Cool spots in NYC

2010-06-09T13:51:00.001-04:00

Locals and Tourists #2 (GTWA #1): New York

Very neat: a heat map of NYC, extracted from Flickr geotagging information. Red indicates photos taken by "locals" (people who stick around) and blue indicates "tourists" (people who don't). The yellow ones can't be easily put in ether category (still thinking through this one). But amazing how a simple criterion like that can basically get it right.

Just in case anyone forgot...

2010-02-17T08:14:00.006-05:00

For an article I'm working on, I thought I'd redo my old illustrations.

1. A gas of hadrons, with mesons (quark and antiquark) and baryons (three quarks or three antiquarks). Each cluster is contained by its own "bag":

2. A quark-gluon plasma, with the same quarks, but with "bags" disappeared and gluons flying around in their place.

All the rest is commentary. Any questions? And yes, I really did try and get the gluons right (sigh).

When gold collides!

2010-02-16T10:56:00.004-05:00

Real time event displays from the STAR experiment at RHIC. This is what their raw data looks like, folks. Pretty neat, even 10 years after the early displays that you see everywhere. And I mean everywhere, even shoes...(thanx, Paul!)

And i was!

2010-02-03T20:55:00.001-05:00

drat.

I might be wrong, but...

2010-02-03T13:08:00.001-05:00

One of my least-well-kept secrets is that I'm mildly obsessed with the old hydrodynamical model invented by Landau and Fermi in the early 50's, which predicts (surprisingly well, IMHO) the total number of particles produced in collisions of nuclei, and even collisions of protons (and angular distributions, and some novel features of the same etc.). The physics is simple (pack all the energy into a tiny volume and let it explode along the beampipe) but the justification is downright bizarre (that all of these microscopic systems form a droplet of fluid as soon as they overlap each other). Of course, RHIC has told us that nuclei seem to form a fluid, and pretty damn quickly -- I'm still looking for a good reason why protons couldn't in principle do the same thing. Of course, making a snappy prediction would help my case.

So the points are nucleus-nucleus data (top trend) and proton-proton data (bottom-trend), and I've tried my hand at extrapolating with a few favorite functions. Unfortunately for me, but congratulations to CMS, the top one (my favorite) is pretty clearly ruled out by the low multiplicity measured by CMS today (4.5 instead of 5.5).

Of course, there are two more experiments to go, and a few more energies to be filled in in the next few years. A man can still dream -- especially since the CMS paper measures the number of particles at 90 degrees relative to the colliding beams, which is *not* the same thing as the total number. Of course, the calculations nominally allow one to predict things at 90 degrees but lots of things can get in the way. No-one said this would be easy!

Meet Clea

2009-09-29T08:43:00.003-04:00

This is the main reason why it's hard to write these days. Bear with me.

Science is Real

2009-09-14T10:06:00.007-04:00

Pardon my going on and on about this , but "Science is Real" is one of my favorite things recently, and not just out of anticipation of watching it over and over again with my daughter in a couple of years (yes, I just said daughter).

From the Carnap quote, to the "kid" bursting with curiosity (but one who still likes good stories -- who shouldn't?), to the frog in the 'fro, to the description of the scientific method ("when a theory emerges" nails it): fantastic back to front.

STAR in the Prince's Eye?

2009-08-29T09:29:00.006-04:00

Voici "Le Petit Prince": A plant-bearing robot for encouraging plant life on, um, Mars:

But is there a certain STAR in this robot's single eye? If we look at 0:32 we see something like this:

Don't know about you, but I see this (from the RHIC images page):

I think someone needs to make a phone call to someone, although nothing I love better than the science we do getting to places I'd never imagine (e.g. Mars). Or am I just, um, seeing things?

Rabbit & lucite blocks

2009-08-21T21:26:00.006-04:00

The rabbit is something one might use in a child's room. The lucite blocks with embedded geometric solids are something else entirely: they've been in my family since I was a small child and I know literally nothing about them. Anyone?

A piece of the strong-correlations puzzle?

2009-08-17T10:15:00.009-04:00

Which one of these things is not like the other? None of them, it may turn out.

Editing a colleague's article over the weekend tipped me off to this piece, by Jorge Quintanilla and Chris Hooley, which ran a few months ago in Physics World. It seems to be concerned with similar issues as our AAAS symposium last winter, the quest to understand strongly-coupled systems, but from the perspective of condensed matter physics:

"Quantum matter is everywhere, from the interiors of neutron stars to the electrons in everyday metals. Like ordinary, classical matter, it is made up of many interacting particles. In classical matter, however, it is possible to think of each particle as an individual entity, whereas in quantum matter Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle forbids us from telling individual particles apart: their behaviour can only be described collectively. In spite of this, many types of quantum matter are quite well understood from a theoretical point of view. For example, the “electron liquid” that is responsible for the flow of electricity through ordinary metals, the magnetic properties of many insulating materials and the normal and superfluid phases of helium at very low temperatures have all succumbed to the probing of theorists.

But the behaviour of some forms of quantum matter has proved a much harder nut to crack. High-temperature superconductors, for example, are not really understood despite more than two decades of research since they were first discovered. Also mysterious are various exotic types of magnet; while the electrical resistance of most metals increases with the square of their temperature, T, for some magnetic metals like manganese silicon the resistance is proportional to T1.5. And then there is the quark—gluon plasma, which occurs when neutrons are pressed together so tightly that their quarks lose their identity and form a single homogenous liquid. Such a plasma is believed to have formed during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, but has also recently been recreated in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US, with further experiments planned at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

All these forms of quantum matter have one thing in common: very strong — rather than weak — correlations between the particles from which they are composed. Materials with weak correlations are relatively easy to understand: as the component particles barely interact with each other, one can extrapolate the behaviour of non-interacting particles (like those in an ideal gas) to get a good insight into how they behave en masse. Strong correlations, however, lead to qualitatively new behaviour. High-temperature superconductors, for example, display not only an unconventional superconducting phase but also mysterious “bad metal” and “pseudogap” behaviours."

While I complained on Twitter about the PW firewall, I did manage to find a PDF of the article posted by the authors -- but don't tell anyone (but with my "select", read "low", number of readers, I'm not too worried at the moment!).

“Nobody got hurt, and I’m not in jail.”

2009-08-15T09:04:00.003-04:00

Of course I could see it coming for the last week or so on Twitter, and we had good reasons, but I'm sad we missed Duke Riley's naumachia in Corona Park. Besides being one of the Best Places in the world (particularly since it has the Unisphere), these kind of things happen all too rarely anywhere, much less NYC.

The (Rail) Road to the Renaissance of RHIC on the Ring Road

2009-07-29T19:18:00.005-04:00

How things change. In 2005, James Simons and Renaissance Partners made an astute investment in science, by funding the last 10% of the RHIC budget for 2006 -- one that literally made 100% of the science possible (remember that most of the budget is taken up in fixed costs). The lab thanked him for his generosity several years ago in a major ceremony, but tomorrow will take the appreciation one step further. The RHIC Ring Road, running along the inside of the collider ring (i.e. it's official, but mainly descriptive -- I don't think I've ever seen a green sign on the road itself) will now be called Renaissance Circle. And the road joining it to the lab will be transformed from the prosaic, but obsolete "Railroad Ave" (also descriptive of the truth, as a track runs alongside it, but this time with green signs) becomes Renaissance Road. So you take Renaissance Road to Renaissance Circle for the new era of RHIC experiments. A lot catchier -- and modern -- than taking Railroad to Ring Road. But it's not in our job description to be catchy: we're scientists, folks, not poets (at least not most of us!)

The only nitpick I can make with the new naming is that a "renaissance" indicates a revival of something lost along the way. Last I checked, RHIC has been incredibly productive, without missing a beat, for almost 10 years now. That said, an undeniable renaissance in science has certainly taken place with the arrival of the Obama administration, which is redoubling efforts to support science nationwide -- and the presence of the Department of Energy tomorrow (William Brinkman, from the Office of Science) makes that clear to all of us.

See you there (esp. at the Autism walk around the RHIC ring at Noon)

I must start writing again

2009-07-29T19:10:00.004-04:00

Some of my favorite tweets from the last few days, translated into English.

"The Rorschach debate almost seems like a Rorschach test itselfhttp://bit.ly/ZiAfv (so download 'em while you can! http://bit.ly/5gNgD )": in other words, the very reaction to the "exposure" of the Rorschach blots raises many of the ambiguities (i.e. issues) people have about the efficacy of the method. There's clearly as much interpretation in the handling of the responses, as the subject has in giving them in the first place.
"unreal - RT @Naunihal: Please make it stop! RT @SlateBoston cop suspended for calling Skip Gates racial slur in email http://tr.im/uEEe": My friend Naunihal forwarded me this link to a Boston Globe article, originally posted by Slate this afternoon. Can this really be happening? Yes, it can.
"Hertzberg recommending movies? @newyorkerdotcom-mers using blogs to expand purview, i guess. http://bit.ly/41IuLT worked on me, anyway": In my naive understanding of the New Yorker hierarchy, it's Lane and Denby who make us want to watch movies, and Hertzberg who leads off the Talk of the Town, typically with astute commentary on our leading political figures. But through those pesky blogs, it's Hertzberg who's recommending movies (Apatow's Funny People), and I'll be damned if he doesn't make me want to see it even more than I did before.

I will start writing again, I promise -- but tweeting is. so. easy...

Still Twittering

2009-06-06T14:18:00.002-04:00

Still twittering like crazy - lots of links and short bursts of commentary - but it takes mindshare away from the blog. Not sure how to solve this yet, until I have complete essay-length thoughts to share, which will be difficult while we are dealing with some of the more intense rites of adulthood, all at the same time. More later!

S.O.S. (Save Austrian Science)

2009-05-12T10:40:00.001-04:00

Just in case you missed it: Austria is planning on pulling out of CERN after 50 years involvement. The claim is that they can use the money (about $21M) elsewhere in the EU.

Anyway, don't think that the Austrian scientific community is taking the news well. They are getting organized and already have a petition online. Please take a minute and sign it:

http://sos.teilchen.at/petition/

It came as a surprise when Federal Minister Hahn announced that he wanted to discontinue Austria's membership in CERN.

This "wrong historic decision" (quoting Prof. Dr. Herbert Pietschmann) must be stopped before Austria's reputation as a nation of high-tech and modern research suffers irreparable damage and our country excludes itself from future developments.

CERN - this is research in elementary particle physics and comology. CERN is a brilliant example of excellence by European cooperation. CERN is the vision of our young scientists.

By signing this petition I urge the Austrian parliament not to agree to this proposition of minister Hahn.

(And I hope no-one missed that ATLAS slide in the AP article!)

(Thanks, Heinz and Paul!)

Redesign

2009-05-05T15:43:00.003-04:00

Not like I have time to fiddle around and redesign things just for the heck of it but, well, I fiddled around and made the design a little cleaner, and even cleaner still with some help from my wife.

So just in case people are reading this via an RSS reader, have a look at the new version and let me know what you think. But if you're from the Kazimir Malevich estate, I'm not home right now -- of course, if you leave your name and number, I'll be sure get back to you right away.

Tesla in Shoreham

2009-05-04T22:50:00.004-04:00

Tesla's lab was located in Shoreham, New York (yes, that Shoreham - but a lovely place I used to live in when I first moved to BNL) in Long Island, just north of Brookhaven. The Times reports on the battle brewing over what to do with the site, which locals and Tesla enthusiasts want landmarked, and which Agfa, the current owner, just wants to jettison. Neat article, and a reminder of how big a presence Tesla was in his time, and how hard he fell.

Plot Device of Mass Destruction

2009-04-28T22:46:00.006-04:00

Don't be afraid, the likelihood of anyone gathering up even a fraction of a gram of anti-matter (as seen here in this still from the Angels & Demons preview) is pretty unlikely. The ATRAP experiment at CERN managed to trap 170,000 antihydrogen atoms, but that's still 18 orders of magnitude (1 with 18 zeros after it!) away from A&D territory.

Now, why was I thinking about this recently, since I'm not much of a Dan Brown fan (I survived Da Vinci, just to see what the fuss was about, but enough)? Dave Mosher, from Discovery Space, asked me to put together a little guest blog on anti-matter, and when the media asks, I deliver. Anyway, please have a gander at my piece, "Plot Device of Mass Destruction", and let me know what you think.

Two things I didn't manage to squeeze into an already-long article:

My introduction to anti-matter was certainly via "The Counter Clock Incident", in the animated Star Trek series from the early 1970's. While the black stars on the white sky, and the total absence of annihilating anything, clearly miss the mark, they did somehow capture Feynman's insight that anti-particles in the matter universe are, in a sense, travelling backwards in time. Who knows if they were reading Bjorken & Drell, and it's sci-fi as all get-out, but it sort of feels like an inside joke for physicists (in a Saturday morning cartoon, no less)
My reminder that people other than I watched Star Trek as kids came when I was visiting NYC from CERN in the mid-1990's. I was staying with a college friend who had gone into finance, and we ended up hanging out in Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon, with a guitar or two in tow. I vividly remember him playing for a bit, looking thoughtful for a second and then asking, "Now that you're a physicist, you can tell me: what is antimatter?" I gave a similar spiel as I wrote in this Discovery Space piece, but somehow he wasn't satisfied. The mystery was too great, and my experienced reality of anti-matter was far too mundane. Hope this try was better!

Anyway, enjoy.

Twittering

2009-04-23T09:22:00.004-04:00

Yes, I broke down and started twittering. I used to find it quite pointless, compared to "normal" blogging, but then I started getting into updating my facebook status, and realized I actually enjoyed microblogging. Then I discovered how to link twitter and FB, and here I am, updating over and over, over on the right side of this page in the little box.

Starry Eyed

2009-04-14T11:15:00.004-04:00

This is really fun (via Gizmodo): a picture how the sky would look if your eyes were as sensitive as a long exposure telescope image.

Explanation: Intricate, glowing nebulae that shine in planet Earth's night sky are beautiful to look at in deep images made with telescopes and sensitive cameras. But they are faint and otherwise invisible to the naked-eye. That makes their relative location and extent on the sky difficult to appreciate. So, consider this impressive composite image of a wide region of the northern winter sky. With a total exposure time of 40 hours, the painstaking mosaic presents a nebula-rich expanse known as the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble above a house in suburban Boston, USA. Within the wide and deep view are nebulae more often seen in narrower views, including the Great Orion Nebula, the Rosette Nebula, the Seagull Nebula, the California Nebula, and Barnard's Loop. The familiar constellation of Orion itself is just above the foreground house. Brightest star Sirius is left of the roof, and the recognizable Pleiades star cluster is above the tree at the right. A version of the big picture that includes simple constellation guidelines is available here.

One can get a sense of this even with the naked eye if you go way out in the desert, e.g. in South Africa. I once saw the large and small Magellanic clouds down there -- with my eyes -- and I was never the same again.

Quark Matter in the News

2009-04-14T09:37:00.014-04:00

Holy moly, what have we here? Quark Matter 2009, on the news...and look there I am in the green down vest just as it begins! And there's Giorgio, breaking our hearts. And Kai and Spencer, trying to convince people that physicists know something about sports (well, some do). And that awesome guy at the end (see below...):

I'm sitting here and I got some things on my mind,
and we're sitting here at Quark Matter two-thousand-and-nine.
Now I can't really explain what all of it means,
I just hope they don't blow us all to smith-er-eens
Hear, hear! (Thanks, Mike!)

New Application (2008 Dirac Medals)

2009-04-13T00:20:00.005-04:00

I missed this, but it's started bubbling up on the PHENIX lists: The Dirac medals were awarded a few weeks ago, and somehow it seems that being interested in the quark gluon plasma is no longer a handicap:

Professors Maldacena, Polchinski and Vafa are being honored for their fundamental contributions to superstring theory. Their studies range from early work on orbifold compactifications, physics and mathematics of mirror symmetry, D-branes and black hole physics, as well as gauge theory-gravity correspondence. Their contributions in uncovering the strong-weak dualities between seemingly different string theories have enabled us to learn about regimes of quantum field theory which are not accessible to perturbative analysis. These profound achievements have helped us to address outstanding questions like confinement of quarks and QCD mass spectrum from a new perspective and have found applications in practical calculations in the fluid dynamics of quark gluon plasma.

The dualities have also led string theorists to conjecture that the five different superstring theories in ten space-time dimensions are manifestations of one underlying theory, yet undiscovered, which has been named the M-theory.

So quark gluon plasma is now a "practical application" of string theory. While I completely agree with it in principle, imagine telling this to your aunt when she asks what your research is good for. Ironically, I usually argue that "helping string theory" is a practical application of studying the QGP at RHIC -- but it's all a matter of perspective I suppose.

In any case, a belated congrats to Maldacena, Polchinski, and Vafa. It's been pretty exciting to see all of this develop in the last decade.

Know Your Reference (Quark Matter 2009)

2009-04-08T00:07:00.004-04:00

So much for those dispatches: I could barely figure out where I wanted to be at any given time, much less come up with reasonable summaries of what I had just seen. Conferences are like that. Anyway, I do have a few photos, but just a few. Above you can see Bill Zajc of Columbia University telling us a few things to keep us focussed, two of them not about heavy ions at all, but about the "control measurements" we do with smaller systems that we assume are "references".

Now that I'm home, it's interesting to reflect on how little attention we've questioned our reference systems as such. Generally, the less we worry about them, the better we feel, since they then remain "someone else's" problem (i.e. that of our particle physicist friends). However, the more I hang out in this neck of the scientific woods, the less I believe that nominally "simple" systems are that simple (even protons are made of many quarks and gluons), or are even that different than the bigger systems we create with huge (ok, still subatomic) nuclei. While it can be a little confusing, I find these ambiguities the most compelling aspects of this business.

I'll get to this in the next few posts. In the meantime, if you want to see the official summaries, check out the four rapporteur talks here.

Quark Matter 2009: Dispatches

2009-03-30T09:12:00.002-04:00

So I'm in Knoxville for the week, with 500 colleagues (it should have been about 550, but the DNS decided not to get their act together and forced quite a few speakers to stay home -- more on that later). The conference is called "Quark Matter 2009", and is the 21st in a series that began in the early 1980's. This time the folks at Oak Ridge took the reins, and we're in for a busy week.

I particularly like the poster this time out: the Great Smoky Mountains, Helvetica everywhere, and the central cluster of stars from the Tennessee state flag, which iconographically refers to the three quarks in the proton, but really refers to the three regions of Tennessee. It's pretty neat that the flag even has a Sol Lewitt style set of instructions associated with it:

An oblong flag or banner in length one and two thirds times its width, the large or principal field of same to be of color red, but said flag or banner ending at its free or outer end in a perpendicular bar of blue, of uniform width, running from side to side; that is to say, from top to bottom of said flag or banner, and separated from the red field by a narrow margin or stripe of white of uniform width; the width of the white stripe to be one-fifth that of the blue bar; and the total width of the bar and stripe together to be equal to one-eighth of the width of the flag.

In the center of the red field shall be a smaller circular field of blue, separated from the surrounding red field by a circular margin or stripe of white of uniform width and of the same width as the straight margin or stripe first mentioned. The breadth or diameter of the circular blue field, exclusive of the white margin, shall be equal to one-half of the width of the flag. Inside the circular blue field shall be three five-pointed stars of white distributed at equal intervals around a point, the center of the blue field and of such size and arrangement that one point of each star shall approach as closely as practicable without actually touching one point of each of the other two around the center point of the field; and the two outer points of each star shall approach as nearly as practicable without actually touching the periphery of the blue field. The arrangement of the three stars shall be such that the centers of no two stars shall be in a line parallel to either the side or end of the flag, but intermediate between same; and the highest star shall be the one nearest the upper confined corner of the flag.

Anyone want to try this without peeking?

Chu @ BNL

2009-03-23T12:55:00.013-04:00

(Funny, my photo is similar to the Times one -- maybe because Revkin was standing next to me!)

Gee I barely had time to introduce this post. Steven Chu, our new Energy Secretary, chose to come to BNL today to announce a major round of funding for science, particularly for the national laboratories. I popped open the new netbook and didn't stop typing for 45 minutes, throughout what turned out to be a quite substantive talk. Enjoy the notes (as raw as they are!):

OK, the first slide is up: "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and America's renewed commitment to scientific research"

Cue Billy Joel muzak again, as with Paterson.

First visit of DOE secretary to a national research lab. Visited facilities and scientists.

He has chosen BNL to make an important funding announcment which will affect science across the US.

Sam acknowledging Kevin Law (NYPA), Schumer (not present), Tim Bishop (BNL's congressman)

Bishop speaking. Honored Secretary has chosen BNL as first lab since being appointed. "Underscores just what a treasure this laboratory is." Announcement will reflect wisdom of recovery act. Puts people back to work, and puts them where the US will lead.

Chu speaking. Grew up in Garden City, Long Island, age 3 to 18. Never made it to Stony Brook (laughter).

Thanking Aronson, BNL staff, Bishop, Dehmer. Struggling to get slides showing on the screen!

"This is an experiment". The secretary cracks wise! It seems the plug was kicked. "Now they're rebooting". "I hope NSLS II works better" (laughter).

There's going to be an announcment, and then "you're going to be subjected to a brief real talk"

Announcement: Obama's budget pledges to double office of science over the next 10 years. Calls for $15B per year into R&D for clean, renewable energy. Extends REsearch and experimentation tax credit for companies.

Slides are up.

Funding for DOE includes $150M for NSLS II.

Funding for 9 labs today. $65M for CEBAF. $277M for energy frontier research centers. $90M for grad students, postdocs and PhD scientists -- via which agency? Directly?

DOE: largest funder of physical scientists. 17 national labs. researchers at 300 universities. 88 nobel universities. LBNL has trained 30+ people who eventually received prizes.

NSLS II will continue scientific legacy that began w/ Cosmotron and AGS -- but in chemistry/biology/materials. What about nuclear/particle?

Photos of SC with TD Lee and Murray Gell-Mann. Story of doing crossword with MGM.

Strong focussing as major contribution of BNL to world. Reflects on early days of betatron oscillations to modern machines like NSLS II with tiny submicron beam spots.

Listing NSLS II properties (10k times brighter than NSLS I, spatial resolution of 1nm). As specs being prepared, LBNL folks were nervous -- major advance beyond known technologies.

Major contributions will be at the "Energy Frontier" (different than usual -- "energy" not "high energy"!)

"The Energy Problem": 1. national security and prospertiy linked to energy, 2. potential for geopolitical conflict from competition for resources, 3. climate change

Reviewing predictions for loss of forests and snowpack and heatwave mortality.

Death of British Columbian pine by 2013 since beetles not killed by frost. 40% already dead by 2006.

Permafrost less permanent.

Issue is preserving vegetation: microbes create lots of CO2 when they don't freeze

Human development index vs Electricity Use. US is highly developed (HDI of 0.95) but no correlation with electricity consumption. Canada and Norway much higher but due to hydro resources.

Showing per capita electricity use: flat in CA since 1973 despite GDP per capita doubling, grew 50%+ nationwide. NYS is 2nd best state in union.

Discussing development of refrigerators since 70's. Energy down by 4, cost by factor of 2-3. Energy saved by better fridges is double than all of renewable energy. One cannot stress how important energy efficiency is.

Buildings are 40% of total US energy. Lighting in commerical buildings is 26% of energy use. Huge opportunities for energy saving.

Experience from time at LBNL on making buildings efficient. Turns out lots of physics problems in helping architects and engineers to design better buildings. Can reduce consumption by 80% -- pays for itself in 10 years.

3 myths: one is that it's just political will. no it requires technology.

what is a transformative technology? electronic amplification and transcontinental telephones. vacuum tube was essential for amplifications (no-one knew exactly how they worked!). required red hot wire and burned out. needed something more reliable -- AT&T started development of transistor. Along the way, Nobel Prizes at Bell Labs (Davisson).

R&D started in late 1930's but wouldn't have started w/o development of Quantum Mechanics. By 1930, a theory for properties of atoms started being applied to condensed matter systems, e.g. Bloch waves. With better understanding of electron transport, maybe we can understand materials well enough that we can make a transistor.

It's unlikely that the transistor could have been invented w/o theoretical underpinning. Same for laser. This is why it's important to invest in basic science.

Batteries! No major change in technology since 1850 (only factor of 2). Big breakthrough by sony with Li-Ion battery - factor of 2 since 2000. Discussion of LBNL technology to improve battery performance. Co block polymer that self-assembles and prevents dendrites from forming and making shorts. 2x energy density of current LiIon. Bad at low temperatures. Instead of trying to fine tune old recipe, a new idea.

New batteries for plug in hybrids, perhaps in 5 years. Lots of smart people now spending time on this.

Moore's law curve of $/MWh vs. Megawatts installed. Factor of 10 between gas turbines and photovoltaics. Need major improvement in PV for it to be viable. DOE predicts parity by 2030. Right now a factor of 5 difference w/o all the subsidies.

"We need transformative solutions to solve the energy problem"

nanotech for producing solar cells.

Population issue? Paul Erlich predicted 100's of millions dying in the 1970's and 1980's. Productivity of land grew while land used stayed constant. 1970 nobel prize on dwarf strains of wheat. Improve food production per acre 3-6x. Also mentioned Haber's invention of artificial fertilizer at turn of century (Nobel prize!). Bosch got another prize for efficient production of ammonia. Another prize for figuring out how it worked. Science coming to the rescue, at least temporarily.

We need science to come to the rescue.

Feedstock grass can produce 1/2 current consumption of gasoline via ethanol. 15x more efficient than corn.
But we may need to invent an artificial plant...

Man first learned to fly by imitating nature. Leonardo invented plane by copying how birds flew. In this respect, Leonardo was a theorist.

Wright brothers had a hybrid solution: replaced muscle power with gasoline engine, but took features from bird wings. Now jets look nothing like birds. Also don't act like birds (e.g. mate and produce new little 747's).

Because you have access to materials not found in nature, can do better than nature (e.g. jet blades are single crystals!)

Can develop more efficient means of photosynthesis (Helios project).

This is part of the challenge.

And finally something else: funding increases for national labs, but how do we best organize assault on energy problem. Mentioning manhattan project and radar -- teams working hard to solve a problem. Bell labs -- strong individuals self-organizing into teams. Nobel prizes at Bell Labs.

There is no equivalent to Xerox PARC or Bell Labs in energy sector. National labs need to develop ideas that will be picked up by private sector.

Mentioning space program (Apollo). Earth - there's nowhere else to go.

Now taking questions.

- What about nuclear technology which can already now solve the problem? SC thinks NE is part of the energy mix. Compared to fossil fuels, no carbon emission. Of course waste & proliferation but they can be overcome. Some stimulus money for nuclear energy in ARRA. Should restart nuclear industry
- Nick Samios: part of Bell Labs was from monopoly power. Can there be regulations or incentives to revive basic research in industrial complex in the US. SC says this was part of BHO's announcement today, the R&E tax credit which needs to be made permanent. US is losing technologies to companies overseas. Need to recapture technologies by exploiting scientific lead and incentives to companies to say that we want these to be home-grown industries.
- How will ARPA-E (energy DARPA to invest in high risk things the private sector won't) being incorporated into DOE structure? Discussing conservatism of academics who need to keep their contracts renewed. So need something to encourage high risk research. He wants a lean organization: 20 people, $200M/year. No constraints. Describing his experience developing atomic fountains into better clocks using air force money (lots of money, but limited duration).
- NY Times reporter (Andrew C. Revkin) applicability of something makes an easy sell. how do you communicate energy/climate problem in a way that gets the same outcome. current R&D is $1B/year where war on cancer etc is 10's of $B/year. Times reporter is videotaping SC's answer! SC makes a comment that people often go to war for energy resources so it makes it crucial to act quickly. Also pace of climate change is worrying. Skeptics say that southern hemiphere is cooling down -- but this was predicted in climate models. Difference between now and ice age is 6 degrees C. 5-6 degrees hotter would make a dramatically different world. He sees people being motivated to go into science for this reason.

Sam has ended session. SC says "Don't clap -- get to work."

Making Waves

2009-03-10T10:31:00.006-04:00

Now I know we all like Animal Collective, right? What I hadn't realized about their new album was that the cover (difficult to see on web pages etc.) was an eye-popping optical illusion ("based on the works of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka" whose illusion page is wild). But, oddly enough, I only figured this out after writing a little ROOT macro to reproduce it (don't ask -- I had one of those "*I* could do that" moments...). After a bit of messing about to get it to look just like the original, and expanding its size to fill my laptop screen, it started moving. If you're a ROOT user, give it a try (and it makes things that look like this).

David Paterson @ BNL

2009-03-02T08:51:00.003-05:00

Just a few photos from the Paterson event at Brookhaven last Friday. Very impressive on all fronts, particularly the solar project at BNL.

And here are more details on:

"Governor Paterson Announces Plans to Support Brookhaven National Laboratory with NYPA Power Allocation": 15MW of lower cost hydro power from upstate
"Governor Paterson Announces Plans for Largest Solar Energy Project in State History": 37 MW just on the BNL site. The comment about there being only 3 solar sites nationwide providing 30 MW or more makes this all the more imprssive.

David Byrne @ Radio City

2009-02-28T23:41:00.007-05:00

Wow that was fun. All of the good stuff ('78-'80 Talking Heads w/ Eno, the new album) played with fire and good feelings. Too bad my camera was too puny to give a good sense of the show.

This Vanity Fair piece gets most of it right: keeping up keeps you young. True for many scientists I know as well.

And for the record, Radio City Music Hall is a wonder.

50 Megawatts from the Sun (Paterson @ BNL)

2009-02-27T13:19:00.013-05:00

NY Governor David Paterson is at BNL today, in part to announce this:

Gov. David A. Paterson is expected at Brookhaven National Laboratory today to tout approval of a LIPA project to add 50 megawatts of solar power to the local power grid - among the largest in the country.

Long Island Power Authority trustees yesterday approved the selection of four solar power firms to erect photovoltaic stations at locations across the region. In addition to Brookhaven Lab, they will be placed on rooftops and parking lots of the Plainview- Old Bethpage Central School District, at landfills in Oyster Bay and Islip, and atop a real estate business.

LIPA hasn't released the cost of the project. Acting LIPA chairman Howard Steinberg said residents should expect the power to cost from two to three times that of conventional fossil-fuel plants.

Paul DeCotis, Paterson's energy chief, said LIPA can expect funds from the recently approved federal stimulus package to help defray part of the "green premium," as well as money from state renewable programs. He said the solar power project will be the first major leg of Paterson's push for 45 percent of the state's electricity to come from efficiency and renewables by 2015.

I've got my seat -- and my laptop, so I'll post anything else I hear (besides the Billy Joel muzak being played as we wait). I suppose we still call that live-blogging, but just saying that sounds so old fashioned. Maybe I should twitter it?

But now that I poke around a bit, I'm a little confused: the Times reported on this issue on Feb 13 and mentioned that LIPA is raising electricity rates by 3.2%. RHIC research is quite dependent on power costs, so will this be a net gain for the lab, after all, despite being a major source of renewable energy for the region? Or will this eventually make the lab's power cheaper, as it would be if you installed it on your own home? Stay tuned.

Update: pushing 2:10 and no Paterson -- someone next to me commented about 200 wasted man-hours.

Forgets Byron Foley -- "you know how they say 'you always forget the one you love'" and apologizes. He's hilarious.

2:19pm DOE has awarded $913M in capital money for the new light source (NSLS II). Wow.

"If I know any more than that I will actually come help with the research."

1000 jobs in construction -- mostly from people who live in Long Island.

BNL has estimates 63M hours of labor needed for NSLS II.

Big announcement: 50MW of hydro power for BNL from LIPA. Lower cost for operations of lab activities, just for NSLS II or for RHIC?

Triple threat: DOE funding, BNL expertise, NY will supply the power. Colleges and universities will be great beneficiaries.

"But there's more"

Feb 11, 2008 was charged for developing recommendation for renewable power. proposal for 50MW of photovoltaic power. Got back opportunties for 400MW, and looking for a venue.

Today: announcing private investor will lease property at BNL, central station solar power plant here at lab!

BNL, along with LIPA and NYSERDA will collaborate to put this in place. Part of getting 45% of energy from renewable sources by 2015 -- BNL solar plant will be a major contribution. "45 by 15" will yield 50000 jobs in NYS.

All of these can also heat hydrogen ("not nitrogen -- I get letters about this stuff") to help store power.

Called BNL a major leader in scientific research and fuel cell research. Benefit to NYS and Long Island, and will transform the US power to produce energy and clean up the atmosphere.

Paterson is done!

Making Connections

2009-02-22T19:21:00.006-05:00

(An edited version of this is going to run in the BNL Monday Memo tomorrow. I just wanted to post it here because...well, because I had written it already! And I post the book cover on the right because...well, because I loved that show as a young PBS viewer and because...well, because this is why I got into the science biz to begin with -- to find unexpected connections! And here's the press rundown -- thanks Clifford!)

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last week in Chicago, the sessions covered a wide range of scientific fields, from climate change to the intersections of mathematics with origami. Of course for me, the highlight was the symposium that I organized with Bill Zajc, professor at Columbia University and former spokesperson for the PHENIX experiment at RHIC.

Titled “Quest for the Perfect Liquid: Connections Between Heavy Ions, String Theory, and Cold Atoms,” the session covered the emerging relevance of the physics done at RHIC to other subfields of physics, ones that were never thought to be related.

It included speakers both from within the RHIC community, as well as from fields who turn out to have a closer connection to RHIC physics than had been realized. It turns out that physicists from three separate fields are all intensely interested in the physics of strongly-coupled liquids, which flow so easily that they are called “perfect” liquids.

PHENIX spokesperson Barbara Jacak of Story Brook University presented the major results from RHIC, which has been providing collisions since 2000. She paid particular attention to the main features of the medium formed in heavy ion collisions at RHIC: that it flows like a near-perfect liquid, a property intimately connected to its ability to stop the motion of fast-moving quarks (both light and heavy). Using these data, RHIC scientists are able to determine a particular ratio -- that of viscosity to entropy density -- to be quite small.

John Thomas, an atomic physicist from Duke University, presented his experimental results on ultracold atomic gases. In these experiments, clouds of atoms are released from optical traps, and their expansion is visualized by laser flash-imaging techniques. An external magnetic field affects the coupling of the atoms and can be tuned to put the system in a strongly-coupled “universal” regime. Here, the system acts in a way similar to RHIC collisions, expanding asymmetrically according to the laws of fluid flow. The viscosity to entropy density ratio has also been measured here and is as low (or maybe lower!) than that found at RHIC.

Rounding out the presenters was (notable blogger) Clifford Johnson of the University of Southern California. He described how the mathematical techniques of string theory are elucidating the properties of these strongly interacting near-perfect liquids, based on the ideas of string theory. These techniques are used to draw a connection between a strongly-coupled quark-gluon liquid in our world of three spatial dimensions and a gravity theory living in four spatial dimensions with a black hole sitting deep in the fifth dimension! While this scenario sounds strange, it provides one of the few concrete predictions arising from string theory calculations -- that the ratio of viscosity to entropy density has a lower limit, a value which seems to be observed by both RHIC and the ultracold atomic physics experiments.

The serendipitous convergence of these three separate fields has been very exciting -- and useful -- for everyone involved, giving all of us the strong sense that we are only starting to grasp its implications. And it is quite striking that the tools of string theory have provided a sharp, testable prediction for the first time -- one that seems to be borne out by experiments from completely different fields.

Our symposium was attended by over 120 people, ranging from high-school students to scientists in a variety of physics subdisciplines, showing the wide interest this emerging field of science has attracted. It was subsequently covered by several physics blogs.

Symmetry magazine’s assistant editor Glenda Chui served as a discussant along with Bill, and they both addressed questions to the speakers following the talks.

Chui herself posted a blog (http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/02/16/a-first-string-theory-predicts-an-experimental-result/) a few days later, which was picked up by digg.com. The interest in Chui’s blog was so great that it overloaded Symmetry's server, necessitating a major upgrade. The comments to the piece show that connecting experimental data to string theory is controversial, especially if this is used to argue for the “reality” of string theory. But such debate is fitting for the kind of forefront science we do here at Brookhaven with RHIC.

The Invisible Tower

2009-02-20T14:54:00.011-05:00

Our apartment is just a few blocks from Madison Square park and can even see the Met Life Tower from the window. I also happen to drive down 23rd St whenever I head to the Midtown Tunnel to get the Brookhaven (a rare event these days, now that I take the LIRR more often). I find the tower a magical structure, particularly when I try and imagine just how huge the clock face must be.

And, something I stumbled on a few months ago completely blew me away. This one is about the Met Life North Building, something not as noticable in the shadow of the gorgeous 770 foot tower. Turns out that it was the base for a planned 100 story skyscraper, but the crash of 1929, um, "descoped" the project a bit. Who knew? But now every time I drive by, I find myself wanting to see the real tower, and not just this beast.

When Water Droplets Collide

2009-02-20T10:16:00.011-05:00

So not exactly world-shattering, but certainly droplet-shattering. I was curious about people who had done this kind of thing -- and Google was kind, yielding up Robert Park's interesting web page. Image after image (and movies) of water droplets colliding: slow and fast, symmetric and asymmetric, head on and glancing. Interestingly, a colleague of mine looked at these yesterday and saw very low-energy nuclear physics (neutron necking, and the like). I looked at these and tried to imagine them relativistically.

Blinking Lights and Other Revelations

2009-02-18T08:38:00.002-05:00

Who can resist these BNL blinking buttons? Clearly no child under the age of 10, judging by how quickly they disappeared once laid out on the table. And no one realized that the tech would let us track their whereabouts forever.

Scenes from the AAAS

2009-02-17T21:03:00.005-05:00

It has been quite a crazy few days since I left for the AAAS meeting in Chicago:

Thursday, reaffirmed my faith (shared by the family Obama) that Avec is one of my favorite restaurants in the country, but I can't figure out how to describe it
Friday, grappling with the almost-unmanageable AAAS sprawl, learning a bit about scientists in Hollywood, and huge events by Sean B. Carroll, Al Gore, and the Ig Nobel folks
Saturday, skipping the science of kissing for the arts of getting scientific insight to Congress (with the impressive Bill Foster), learning about the human propensity for blinkenlights at the BNL booth, the joys of neo-Origami, Chicago evening fireworks on the river, and the fun of science journalist parties (and congrats to the AAAS award winners!)
Sunday, the wonders of Houlihan's breakfast, surviving our symposium (audience shown above!), missing the Higgs discussion at the FNAL/CERN symposium, and bumping into a few physioblogospheric luminaries (yes, that's two Sean Carrolls in three days...)

A few attempts at documentary photography can be found in the usual place.

And more to come on the symposium itself. I'm still processing things -- e.g. our crashing symmetry magazine's site with thousands of hits, apparently thanks to Digg.

Physics of Splashes

2009-02-06T17:10:00.002-05:00

A nice piece from NPR on jets from dropping a ball into sand or water. It's not new, but the video is quite clear about laying out the problem and showing how the scientists understand the problem.

Some of this research is also featured on the APS Focus page who posted one of the videos of jets in liquid.

Download original video

(X-msvideo 1.98MB)

Senate Cuts to Science Stimulus

2009-02-06T10:49:00.005-05:00

Zeroing out all of the increases for NSF and the office of science (in the DOE part)? Who are these people?

This is ghastly -- and does the opposite stimulating innovation in the US.

Upcoming: AAAS Symposium (2/15/09)

2009-01-29T08:20:00.009-05:00

This is a shameless plug for something I am organizing at the upcoming AAAS 2009 meeting in Chicago, in just a couple of weeks. I and several colleagues, in collaboration with the BNL Public Affairs folks (who are promoting this as well), are putting together a short symposium about the physics we do at RHIC, and how it relates to other, wide-ranging fields of science. In particular, we have people discussing both string theory, connected through the famous "AdS/CFT Correspondence", and cold atomic physics.

What relates all of these three topics (as I attempted to illustrate in the triangle diagram above) is the idea of the "perfect liquid". Both RHIC physicists and cold atomic physicists have discovered liquid-like behavior in their respective systems, despite a factor of 10^20 (1 with 20 zeros after it) difference in temperature (i.e. RHIC makes liquid at 2 trillion degrees, while the atomic guys make them at billionths of a degree above absolute zero!). And the most interesting predictions made about the properties of both systems have come from string theory, using calculations where gravitons scatter off of a black hole sitting in the 5th dimension. No kidding.

Seriously, how often do people in such disparate subjects discover that they are working on similar problems? Anyway, if this piques your interest, please stop by the symposium at the AAAS 2009 in Chicago on Sunday, Feb 15, 10:30am (yes, yes, registration required...)

John Updike, RIP (The Gall!)

2009-01-27T22:36:00.006-05:00

Sad news, hearing of the death of John Updike. I've only read a Rabbit or two and kept up with him in the New Yorker, but no physicist can avoid "Cosmic Gall": one of the only poems I can think of dedicated to an elementary particle.

Oddly, I just came across this poem this last sunday, while literally racing through Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar (excellent stuff, but not a good enough fit to RHIC physics for us to pursue him as a speaker this summer...). But it's not that strange of a coincidence -- the poem is everywhere in the physioliterasphere, i.e. Gell-Mann was certainly not my introduction to it. I've seen it tacked on cubicle walls, reproduced in physics books, pasted into blog posts (July 2005 Cosmic Variance). And now, I repeat it again, in (but certainly not by) memory:

NEUTRINOS, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
and painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
and pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed-you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

The Story of Hope

2009-01-20T14:25:00.004-05:00

A very neat story of where Shepherd Fairey got the image now immortalized on those amazing posters (a B&W version of which I have on my office door, when it's not being taken down mysteriously...). And the show is opening at Danziger Projects tonight.

White House Blog

2009-01-20T14:01:00.002-05:00

The new White House Blog should be interesting, but is anyone else not seeing the inaugural address?...

Restoring Science

2009-01-20T13:58:00.001-05:00

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.

The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth.

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs.

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

All this we can do. All this we will do

Right on.

Moving On

2009-01-20T13:44:00.004-05:00

A Few Days in Stellenbosch

2008-12-10T16:33:00.002-05:00

Great workshop so far: fantastic setting and excellent discussions about black holes, QCD, strings, dualities, etc. All the fun stuff, all in one place. Anyway here are some photos. Enjoy.

Where The Black Hole Went

2008-12-08T09:57:00.003-05:00

The Economist tells us that "saving seems like pouring money into a black hole." I always wondered what had happened to that black hole we didn't make at the LHC...

Cape Crusaders

2008-12-06T13:24:00.004-05:00

So just as I start to blog a tiny bit, I'm disappearing again for another work trip (and a bit more). This time it's off to Cape Town (well, Stellenbosch, really) for a workshop on "Applications of Gauge/Gravity Duality". It'll be me and a lot of string theorists, where naturally I'll be the token experimentalist. Still, should be a blast in a beautiful place -- and hopefully I'll learn a thing or two, and teach a thing or two. In any case, it's great to have a chance to spread the RHIC gospel. More later.

Chance and the Curies

2008-12-04T17:45:00.008-05:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine who works for the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers asked my wife and me to be her guests to hear Lauren Redniss, an artist and writer (nominated for a Pulitzer for her NYTimes Op-Art pieces). It felt like something out of a mysterious teen novel to go to the NY Public Library, amble up the stairs gawking at the high ceilings and stone work, and have to knock to gain entry to the conference room (where they nicely served Dominican food for lunch).

Redniss, who has written/drawn about dancers and chess and people and their lives in New York, is tackling the lives of Pierre and Marie Curie who did pioneering studies in radioactivity (and Marie even coined the term). It is an interesting approach, trying to tie various aspects of their lives to the science they devoted themselves to (and devote themselves they did -- sounds like they didn't get out of the lab much!).

Pierre Curie died in a freak accident in a Paris street, where he tripped and had his skull crushed by a heavily-laden horse-drawn carriage. Redniss related this to the concept of the "normal accident", one which occurs in complex, tightly coupled systems, where one seemly-trivial problem may randomly coincide with another, and their combination may trigger a catastrophe. Turns out that Three Mile Island is the paradigmatic case, a fact that Redniss interestingly ties back to the Curies -- their work having made nuclear power (eventually) possible. She also connected it to the randomness of radiation itself.

The thing that struck me about that latter point was that the randomness of life and the randomness of radioactive processes aren't really the same. The randomness of life is one that emerges out of complex environments, like cities, where many people and things move according to their own agendas and interact (physically, socially, etc). Getting hit by a car is the result of a long causal chain which brought you to that crosswalk, and a different causal chain which brought the car there at the same exact time, and then perhaps another factor which makes you cross against the light etc. The point here is that there is a long, confusing, but nominally well-defined set of events that could in-principle be reconstructed to explain why that accident occurred where and when it did.

But radioactivity (and indeed any quantum mechanical system) is different. As far as we know, quantum mechanical processes like nuclear decay just happen when they happen, and completely at random. The life or death of Schrodinger's cat, and the mystery of the thought experiment relies on this truly random nature of quantum processes. All attempts to reduce quantum probabilities to the deterministic activity of hidden degrees of freedom have failed (see e.g. Bell's Theorem). Thus for all practical purposes, radioactivity is one of the purest examples of irreducibly random behavior existing in nature, and this is no small thing: generating random numbers with computers (e.g. pick a number between one and ten) is a non-trivial thing, and most only make "pseudorandom" numbers at best.

Anyway, I did manage to ask if she had considered this difference in her thinking-through of the story she was trying to tell. Of course I also managed to say that radioactivity was the "only" way that such randomness was manifest in nature, which is obviously wrong. Luckily the roomful of writers, historians, and graphic designers didn't catch me right off. Too bad that a well-known historian of science was also in the room, who did!

#44

2008-11-07T00:18:00.001-05:00

(Thanks, Naunihal!)

Hope and Progress and Change

2008-11-04T08:12:00.004-05:00

Are you ready? I am. I have a long line to brave at the home for the visually-impaired just around the corner, and then it's getting ready for a physics talk in Israel next week, and following results to check those prediction sites: 538 (O by 6 and change with 346 electoral votes), RCP (7.8%), Princeton (53%/352), inTrade (350). Also keeping fingers crossed for the congressional elections as well.

Save Italian Physics from Il Buco Nero (The Black Hole)

2008-10-23T11:42:00.005-04:00

I received this from a former colleague of mine, an American who moved to Italy for his scientific career. Normally, I wouldn't forward this, but it's quite alarming (and it involves black holes, in the most negative, and essentially real, way possible):

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am writing to enlist your support in our protest against new funding cuts and hiring restrictions that threaten the future of Italian research. These new laws were described in a recent article and editorial in Nature (455, pp. 835 and 840). In the specific case of the INFN, these cuts put most of the temporarY staff (including most young researchers) at risk.

I would like to ask you to read and consider signing our petition on our web site:

http://www.buconero.eu

Under the heading "In English" there is much additional background information for the international community (including links to the Nature articles). We would also be greatful if you could bring this issue to the attention of your interested colleagues.

I can't think of any good reason not to sign, so I did.

Pong - invented by Nuclear Physicists

2008-10-23T08:19:00.008-04:00

This is fantastic:

In 1958, William "Willy" Higinbotham designed what he considered to be a simple electronic game using an analog computer, two clunky metallic controllers and an oscilloscope screen. Named Tennis for Two, his game would become part of the groundwork for a multibillion-dollar industry.

At the time, Higinbotham was a nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton. Looking for a way to draw people to the lab's annual visitors' day, he came up with the concept of the game.

On Friday, the laboratory will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tennis for Two with a re-creation of the game and a tour of the instrumentation division where it was created. Bob Dvorak Jr. remembers being the first child to play the game.

I knew this story, but never thought of it before as an equivalent to the WWW being invented at CERN. If this is what physicists do for fun (i.e. spawn multi-billion dollar industries), maybe the world (and specifically the US) should Fund. More. Physics.

Anyway there's also this nice article at BNL.

And of course, a video:

Fright Night

2008-10-21T23:27:00.002-04:00

Yes I saw the Palin cold open on SNL, and I got the point. She's trying to show that she's a good sport, she can face down her critics on their own turf, and so won't seem as lame and out of touch if McCain loses and she needs to go from running for VP to something more manageable, and less dangerous for blue staters everywhere, like Senator of Alaska. But while canny, she did nothing to mitigate my outright fear of her taking power of any sort. Put simply, she freaks me out a bit.

I went canvassing for Obama several weeks ago, and when the good folks in Bucks County, PA asked me why they should vote for Obama, something like this jumped to mind, although I wasn't sure if I was just overreacting -- so it's nice to find out that I'm not alone:

Her vaulting ambition scares the living daylights out of me.

Art & Science: All in the Family?

2008-10-21T21:01:00.006-04:00

David at symmetry breaking points out the question of musicians (by which he means serious musicians, or at least rich/famous ones) with physicist parents. David's got Mark Everett (whom I wrote about a few years ago) and I've noticed a surprising number of well-known creative children with physicist parents, particularly folks in the motion picture (TV & film) industry:

Kieslowski muse Irene Jacob (Red, Double Life of Veronique), daughter of Maurice Jacob
Character actor Josh Pais, son of Abraham Pais
Pirates of the Carribean director Gore Verbinski, son of Vic Verbinski (nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge)
TV Star Jon Stewart's (nee Liebowitz) estranged father was apparently a physicist

Of course, the begged question is if the rates of talented kids from physicists in any sense exceeds those descended from other professions. Anyone with insight on this? I personally came from a family with deep involvements with the arts (art history majors, sibling with MFA, art collecting, etc.) and I ran as fast as I could to the sciences, so I could imagine the inverse effect (by detailed balance, natch).

A Secret Web

2008-10-19T00:16:00.010-04:00

So with K out of town, I ventured a few blocks away to Union Square (after a few Chelsea openings -- more on this later...) to see the Secret Machines at Webster Hall. The latter was an eye-opener it itself, with lurid, outrageous reliefs on the walls, but the band did not disappoint either (although they trended a bit proggy for my tastes in this show). In particular, the stage set was striking, both in how what seemed like inocuous gauze strips attached to plastic piping suddenly transformed into a compelling geometric pattern (Moire, even?) with only a few twists and a few cable ties.

I dug around for a bit and found out that it was designed by Es Devlin, a European set designer:

The visual elements are a direct instinctive response to the qualities of the music. The band will be caught within a Naum Gabo-inspired romboid structure surfaced with gauze and punctuated with radiating tensioned cables which will catch the light in a more lyrical way than a pure saturated block of back light - we might combine them and counterpoint them with pure blocks of backlight too. What the fans see will be a visual expression and counterpoint to what they hear allowing them the space to project their own interpretation of the music and the courage to intensify it.

I'm still not sure this tells me exactly what I wanted to know (I didn't associate the word "romboid" with this kind of pattern...), but fun nonetheless. Naum Gabo, eh? The word seems to be "linear construction" but there has to be a more general term for this kind of thing, especially the "fixed" points these twists generate. Live and learn.

And I just remembered, I've blogged about these guys before. Feels like a lifetime ago, so I feel even older now.

And for fun, here's the silk screen poster (I got 87/400), keeping up with the "linear construction" theme. Strange that just a few hours beforehand, I was admiring a set of multi-layer lithographs at a Chelsea gallery by Stefan Kurten. Much more intricate than this, but a neat coincidence.

Obama v. Einstein

2008-10-16T13:51:00.002-04:00

I haven't seen much discussion of science in this campaign season, and this video doesn't really fit the bill either, but I found this discussion cryptic as well, so it's nice to see people thinking out-of-the-box...right?

Front Page News

2008-09-20T11:07:00.003-04:00

Yeah, yeah, $700 billion is a lot of money, but the real front page news is a bit below the fold: Problems Stall Action for Collider. CERN's DG Robert Aymar email to CERN personnel tells the story more precisely:

Incident in LHC sector 34

Dear Colleagues,
During commissioning (without beam) of the final LHC sector (sector 34) at high current for operation at 5 TeV, an incident occurred at mid-day on Friday 19 September resulting in a large helium leak into the tunnel. Preliminary investigations indicate that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure. CERN's strict safety regulations ensured that at no time was there any risk to people.

A full investigation is underway, but it is already clear that the sector will have to be warmed up for repairs to take place. This implies a minimum of two months down time for the LHC operation. For the same fault, not uncommon in a normally conducting machine, the repair time would be a matter of days.

Further details will be made available as soon as they are known.

Best regards
Robert Aymar

But really, folks: these machines rarely come up quickly and problem-free. RHIC has been running for years, but people never mention that it had a very tough first year, and every start-up each year had its scary moments (including these repairs involving "warm-up" of the superconducting helium, which necessarily take weeks to months). So we should all keep our fingers crossed, but I doubt that it's time to be overly worried at this point.

DFW RIP

2008-09-14T00:28:00.004-04:00

I can't add too much about his importance to fiction in general than the various obits that are appearing as I write, but I can say that for a quite a few years, David Foster Wallace's writing was a guiding presence in my life. Infinite Jest was a beautiful, sprawling mess, but one that got me through my year of thesis writing (e.g. it took me almost half of that year to plow through it), and taught me things about Boston that simply living in Cambridge wouldn't ever achieve (and taught me the fun of the egregious footnote). A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, among other things, consolidated a lingering fascination with pro tennis that IJ seeded, and made consider the abstract beauty and physical elegance of the sport (and I've still never taken a cruise). Everything and More was a manic trip through the life and work of Georg Cantor that, despite it's verve and love of the subject and vain hope to explain it to the literate masses, made me question the very existence of editors in the publishing industry. And Consider the Lobster made me do just that, although the drastically abridged audiobook iTunes sold me, that got me through quite a few rides back and forth to BNL, made me deconsider it just enough to eat them again.

Needless to say, I'm crushed by his passing. WTF, DFW?

Tune-in (to XKCD "Turn On")

2008-09-10T13:12:00.004-04:00

Things will only get sillier.

A Great Day

2008-09-10T12:27:00.003-04:00

There's the NYTimes home page taken up with the LHC and Apple (a shameless fanboy, here). On the other hand, Lehman starts going down the tubes. On balance, a great day then, and no surprises so far.

BNL Media Event

2008-09-10T10:54:00.002-04:00

BNL Media Event (CERN Connection)

I'm trying to keep up with this but there's a lot going on today. Have a look at my flickr set if you want to see the fun.

Wrong Way, Google (or, the Googlon)

2008-09-10T10:31:00.004-04:00

Very cute, Google, but the logo shouldn't be going into the collision. That's what a stable, ultramassive black hole would do - and we aren't likely to make any of those (but maybe some of the unstable, microscopic kinds!). Rather, we're looking for things emerging from the collision, like a Higgs boson. That said, if you guys want to put up some funding, I'm sure someone will find something to name for you all: a Googlon, anyone?

Begin the Begin

2008-09-10T06:48:00.001-04:00

It will be hard to avoid today, but it's all over the LHC blogs, with pictures.

Who Are You Going to Call VP?

2008-08-29T11:11:00.005-04:00

Did anyone else notice that Sarah Palin, McCain's recently-picked running mate,
has an uncanny resemblance to
Annie Potts in Ghostbusters?

Bolt of Genius

2008-08-22T17:52:00.003-04:00

Ever had one of those months? Yeah, me too.

Anyway, it's given me more time to read the paper, where I noticed this gem in a Times article about Usain Bolt, the Jamaican runner who shattered the previous 200m record by two one-hundredths of a second, which apparently sets "new parameters on what humans can achieve":

“You have people who are exceptions,” said Stephen Francis, the coach of Bolt’s main Jamaican rival, Asafa Powell, the former 100 world-record holder. “You have Einstein. You have Isaac Newton. You have Beethoven. You have Usain Bolt. It’s not explainable how and what they do.”

Who can argue with that, and especially with using two physicists as points of comparison?

Beam in LHC

2008-08-09T10:24:00.002-04:00

Wow this is really happening, Rama Calaga and Adam Yurkewicz are reporting live on the LHC actually putting beam in the machine. Stay tuned.

Bernese Bat Signal

2008-07-26T09:49:00.007-04:00

We bumped into this unreal sunset/cloud/mountain configuration up on Obersteinberg in the Bernese Oberland. As I noticed this from our room, grabbed my camera, and bolted outside, everyone from the berghaus started doing the same thing. Then I got home, and noticed this:

And yes, I saw the movie last night, but didn't see any alpine sunsets anywhere -- just that crazy Joker everywhere.

Bernese Oberland

2008-07-23T22:50:00.003-04:00

One thing I haven't had a chance to mention yet is that K and I finally took a vacation a few weeks ago, just before my trip to Bern. We managed to hike our way through a bit of the Bernese Oberland, roughly following the Alpine Pass Trail. The photos (or at least the ones we've posted!) can be found here.

Taking PHOBOS Apart

2008-07-23T10:24:00.003-04:00

One of my BNL colleagues wanted to see these again, so I decided just to go ahead and post them online. These are the most recent photos of PHOBOS in its final incarnation, as it was when we had to take it apart in 2005 and put it in "cold storage" for a few years. You can finally see all of the various pieces of the system we usually show as a CAD drawing in our scientific talks -- the magnet, the silicon, the beampipe, etc. Frankly, while at first glance it looks quite chaotic, I find the silicon detectors themselves alarmingly symmetric and beautiful looking. And incredibly clean, which is unsurprising considering they were safely protected in a light-tight enclosure for 6 years! Enjoy.

View from Fort L'Ecluse

2008-07-19T11:18:00.006-04:00

Still catching up from my long trip. Here are a few photos from an afternoon playing hookey from meetings. An ALICE friend of mine had stumbled onto Fort L'Ecluse years ago, on another hookey trip, and wanted to check it out again. However, this time they'd completely revamped the fort, made it into a museum, and given access to the upper fort (Fort Superieur) 1000 steps in the air. While I hadn't expected a Washington Monument level climb, it was totally worth it for the views (of Mont Blanc, the Rhone, and the Vuache) which happened to be on the most perfect day I'd seen in Geneva for quite a while. Anyway, enjoy.

For those curious, the fort is a drive about 20 minutes southwest of CERN (just between Meyrin and Saint-Genis-Pouilly, straddling the border), at a "notch" in the Jura just below Collonges, which looks like this (thanks, Google):
So it gives fantastic views towards the Alps to the east, especially Mont Blanc, which features prominently in a few of the photos.

CERN Rainbow

2008-07-11T14:23:00.001-04:00

CERN Rainbow

I know things have been silent on this blog since before I left for Switzerland, but it's been flat out for me since that Wall-E post. First I had to get ready for my trip, which involved a week in the Bernese Oberland, a week in Bern for an ATLAS meeting, and now a partial week here at CERN getting my head around ATLAS itself. Then I had to hike up and down mountains for a week, breathing the cleanest air, drinking the cleanest water, and eating lots of swiss hiking food. I've just finished the week in Bern, which is an unbelievably nice place, especially with the weather. And now I'm holed up in a hostel room at CERN (the CERN hostel being better than many hotels I've seen) waiting out the intermittent rainstorms. Of course with crazy weather comes some crazy luck, like this circular rainbow hovering over Geneva: auspicious, no?

The BNL of the Future

2008-06-22T16:03:00.004-04:00

I totally missed this, but the marketing for the upcoming Pixar film Wall-E has a fake website for a company called "Buy-N-Large", whose acryonym is kind of familiar to me:

I wonder if anyone at the lab is going to make the connection? Of course, this new BNL has to compete with Banco Nazionale del Lavoro in Italy, and Bare Naked Ladies, and, um, B&L Associates. But the movie seems to suggest that BnL will be all right, especially from the perspective of the far future.

Needless to say, that despite a major work trip coming up the next day, my wife and I will be lining up to catch Wall-E when it opens this week. The NYTimes article yesterday (today?) made sure that resistance would be futile, at least for us.

Physics and Politics

2008-06-10T11:24:00.004-04:00

From 0 to 3 in 15 years is pretty good: “'If we continue to reproduce in this manner,' Mr. Foster began, and Mr. Ehlers finished the thought, 'the entire Congress would consist of physicists!'"

I actually spent time on Capitol Hill when I was in college, working for a Congressman. Fascinating time, but that was a major inflection point in my life story, when I decided to do science instead -- hoping to avoid some of the messiness of politics in my real life. Of course, do science for a few years and the messiness of it comes roaring back at you: so I really respect these guys trying to roll up their sleeves and interject fact-based reasoning into the policy-making process.

The Four Phases of PHOBOS

2008-06-06T09:02:00.007-04:00

Of course I'm still catching up with last week, partly due to distractions this week, and partly since it took a few days for the organizers to post all of the talks from the RHIC Users Meeting. One talk which was particularly significant to me was "The Four Phases of PHOBOS" by Wit Busza from MIT, who has been spokesman of the PHOBOS experiment at RHIC since its inception in the early 1990s. He was even spokesman before PHOBOS was even a proposal, back when it was a conceptual design called "MARS", shown here to the right, which eventually became the PHOBOS experiment (side note: while MARS was actually an acronym, PHOBOS never was, even if it was presented like one). And he was there all the way through it's first incarnation as a working experiment, even in pieces (see left), through its "golden age" from 2000-2005 as a working active experiment (below), and even now as the collaboration is still analyzing the data and writing papers despite the experiment being completely disassembled.

In fact, it was also notable that last week was when PHOBOS was finally taken from BNL and brought to MIT by van (see loading photos below), where various sections will be shipped to the participating institutions -- the physics equivalent of a hunting trophy. Of course this is kind of like a hunter mounting a gun on the wall instead of the deer. Too bad you can't put a "perfect fluid" (or whatever) on the wall -- since, although small, we were an active participant in that hunt since the very beginning.

Bo Diddley

2008-06-02T13:57:00.003-04:00

Bo Diddley, RIP. I saw him in 2004 (where the Times photo was probably taken), at a monstrous garage rock festival on Randall's Island, impressive as ever, with a guitar I could scarcely imagine without seeing it myself, with so many knobs, sliders, levers, and controls. Too bad no-one ever figured out how to patent a beat back in the 1950's -- he'd have died a rich, rich man.

The Gospel According to Oliver

2008-06-01T12:32:00.006-04:00

It was hard to know what exactly to expect from this event, where Oliver Sacks was guest speaker at the Abyssinian Baptist Church up on 138th Street in Harlem as part of the World Science Festival. But pairing a short, but substantial talk by Sacks about "Music and the Brain", with a full-on gospel concert by the Abyssinian Gospel Choir, and introductions by Calvin O Butts III, an impressive speaker in his own right, made for a stellar evening. Brian Greene even gave a star turn doing his best impression of a Baptist preacher, and then took off for his Guggenheim gig downtown (anyone see that?). Even better, I had a Quantum Diarist sighting -- that's Stephon Alexander standing in the front with Jim Gates (who also was part of the Gugg event), as they were acknowledged by Butts during his introduction.

UPDATE: The TED blog has asked if they could use my photo for their report on the same event.

Dept. of Shamelessness, Part II

2008-05-31T12:34:00.003-04:00

And before things accelerate again, just wanted to pass along a couple more pieces of good news. On Thursday, during the RHIC/AGS Users Meeting (yes it ran all week), two things happen that don't normally Happen To Me: a certificate of appreciation for helping bring the BNL Cafe in reality (I'm still blushing -- all I wanted was a cup of coffee), and I survived the election to win a seat (one of several) to the Users Executive Committee. Growing up, I never really thought of myself as community-minded, but something seems to have changed in the last few years. Brookhaven is a lovely place, and RHIC a great place to work, and it's been fun to take a more active role in keeping it that way.

Moscow on the Moskva

2008-05-31T10:59:00.005-04:00

As bookends to that trip to Dubna I took for work a few weeks ago, I managed to schedule in a couple of days in Moscow to see the sights (which are many) and visit an old friend who's been living there in recent years. Moscow was really spectacular, from Red Square to St. Basil's (pictured), and from the unbelieveable churches of the Kremlin to the futuro-bizarro restaurant atop the Academy of Sciences, with views over the city. I've posted a few photos in the usual place.

Entropy Bound in Physics World

2008-05-30T14:11:00.003-04:00

From the department of shamelessness, I submit to you an article in Physics World about this very blog. Really flattering that it exists at all, but gee it's sobering to hear an outside view of things (i.e. I only saw the piece today, after it had gone live)

Thank You (Faputtinme on the NYTimes Website)

2008-05-29T10:46:00.004-04:00

Sly Stone is one of my favorites, and this is my favorite period of his career. And his 1973 expression, surrounded by the ephemera of the modern web, is priceless.

The PHOBOS Glauber Monte Carlo

2008-05-29T09:59:00.005-04:00

As a follow up to this post, several colleagues and I just posted a paper to the arxiv today: "The PHOBOS Glauber Monte Carlo." This is one of those technical-sounding things, but which has had a surprising relevance to understanding actual RHIC data. Many people treat nuclear collisions by considering the nuclei to be overlapping smooth distribution of protons and neutrons. However, it is also reasonable to treat nuclei as clumps of protons and neutrons as individual particles, especially since that's, um, what they are. The interesting part is that the positions jiggle around collision to collision, and those fluctuations seem to have real manifestations in physical phenomena (see, e.g., this paper).

Anyway, there is an amusing back story here: when we were writing one of the early PHOBOS papers back in 2000, we discovered that we needed our own implementation this kind of thing. I was on a trip to South Africa at the time, so I cobbled something together on the plane -- and this is the core of what we've now put out for public release almost 8 years later. That said, it's not rocket science (i.e. every experiment has their own version), but despite a ream of papers and Glauber reviews, there have been relatively few codes available until now. Enjoy.

The Physics of Privacy

2008-05-28T09:56:00.002-04:00

Fantastic -- an anonymous donor has recently stepped up to contribute $5 million to Fermilab (via the University of Chicago) to help end its furloughs.

It's incredible that Congress as a whole still does not appreciate the intrinsic interest high energy and nuclear physics generate outside the field. RHIC already showed that private funding actually makes both sides look good: the donor for supporting something which promotes science and technology, and participating in the process of discovery, and the scientists for attracting the attention of powerful people outside the government. While it clearly will never be enough to rely on private donors, it bodes well for the future of the field.

RHIC Users Meeting

2008-05-28T09:52:00.004-04:00

Gee it's been a longer hiatus than expected. First was that trip to Russia. Then it's been madness finishing a proposal (more on that soon). Then it was memorial day weekend and a trip down to the Chesapeake bay. And now it's the RHIC Users Meeting at Brookhaven. We've already had a full day of workshops (I attended one on various correlation measurements used to characterize jets in heavy ion collisions) and now it's an all day symposium on RHIC and its impact on Nuclear Physics. So far nothing brand new to report, but the day has just begun.

Bait and Switch

2008-05-08T09:45:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking a bit about Kelly McMaster's book about Shirley, her hometown just a few miles south of BNL, and the air of mystery she tries to generate about the lab where I work, a sense which she passes on to those who listen to and interview her (and who often have never been out there).

The main disconnect I sense with her argument (and full disclosure: I haven't read the book yet, but have only heard interviews and read some of her writing online) is between her sense of wonder about the lab as a child, with her fear and loathing of it as an adult.

The wonder, from her Mother Jones piece:

As a child, I imagined the lab’s buildings were made of an igloo-like substance, and the rooms inside were full of metallic file cabinets, clinking glass test tubes, and notebooks full of secret codes. Men and women in crisp white lab coats and plastic goggles coaxed new species of frogs and lizards out of mottled purple eggs. Others hovered over milky glass globes of light whose kinked antennas sparked blue shots of electricity into the dim, silent air.

And the loathing, in the same paragraph:

My neighbor worked as a maintenance man at the lab, and he often teased that he glowed in the dark. After he died of brain and lung cancer, my imaginary lab became a much darker place—a small, sinister pocket hiding in the pines.

The strange part for me is that I can identify with the disconnect between the childhood fantasy and the adult reality, but mine is a different trajectory than hers (and don't assume I'm unaware of the emotional trauma of a close loved one with cancer).

I gravitated toward a scientific life with fantasies of sci-fi movies running through my head, with large machines emitting lightning at the flip of a huge Frankenstein-type switch, or several people poring over softly-glowing computer screens as an experiment produces fantastic data in real-time, and great discoveries are made. I thought this kind of thing actually happened even as I started grad school (even if I had never seen it in my various research summers...)

Unfortunately, the gap between fantasy and reality is as large as the gap between a scientific experiment and comprehending its implications. Things always take a long time to get started, a long time to happen, and a long time to understand, and often involve false starts, misundertandings, mistakes, retries, etc. This is because we have to constantly test our hypotheses against what we observe in the world around us, either through our own experiments or by scouring the literature (which also takes forever) for similar results. Kind of like a journalist, come to think of it. Bottom line is that the daily work of the scientific life just isn't as colorful -- or ever as sinister -- as McMasters seems to imagine (the conferences and talks etc are another matter -- fun as can be).

That said, maybe I speak as someone who is officially allowed to enter my lab on a daily basis (a privilege I share with 2500 other employees, less than 1000 being scientists, I should add). I suppose if you are put off by the fact that someone at the gate asks who you are, then you might wonder if the lab is hiding something, and develop a sense of mystery to justify one's feeling as an outsider. Then again, you might not have noticed that they have public lectures and musical recitals (always open to the public) almost every week. But it's possible that I only perceive the friendly-and-open side of things -- some bias of this sort is unavoidable, it seems.

So the child in me always wishes someone would take me to the secret parts of the lab --where the lights are flashing, and lightning strikes, and green goo runs out of a vat into the ground, i.e. where the wild things are. But maybe no-one seems to know where they are anymore -- or maybe they aren't there, and were never there. Or maybe I've just grown up a bit and actually taken a look around.

But when you get down to it, it's a bait-and-switch: when you are growing up, no-one ever tells you that things aren't so colorful and mysterious, so by the time you finally realize that it's not, you've found a much more interesting -- albeit prosaic --real world to ponder.

The Raw and the Cooked

2008-04-29T18:19:00.003-04:00

Hm, my brain is shutting down now, since I just finished giving a long workshop talk here at BNL. The talk is linked above and is not a new topic for me (whether or not the initial state of a RHIC collision is smooth or lumpy, kind of like the green stuff in the image above). Still, it was a nice chance to highlight a relatively new paper we just had published in Physical Review C, and a great chance to catch up with colleagues who really like this stuff.

I know it sounds very academic, but it's not (I know I doth protest too much). When you try and "run the movie backwards", starting from this,
it's important to consider various scenarios of how things looked just as the collision occurred, and not just at the end of the day, when the particles arrived for your perusal.

Why Black Holes are Good For You

2008-04-29T18:11:00.002-04:00

While I wouldn't want to eat one, they clearly make you think about many issues -- some scientific, and these days even moral. But some think more clearly and explain things more generously than others.

The only involvement I can claim with this excellent post by Sabine on Backreaction is finally pushing her over the edge (with this) to blog in public about her take on the non-dangers of black holes, micro or not. It's a great read -- with something to say to many people, including the folks in the media who have really been milking the doomsday story dry.

But who the heck made this crazy video of the earth being swallowed by a fictional black hole Beyond a certain point this goes beyond speculation, and becomes manipulative demagoguery.

Half

2008-04-25T10:23:00.003-04:00

Hm. Maybe MC knows something Stephen Hawking missed, as suggested by his (relatively famous) quote:

Although equations are a concise and accurate way of describing mathematical ideas, they frighten most people. When I wrote a popular book recently, I was advised that each equation I included would half the sales. I include on equation, Einstein's famous equation, E=mc². Maybe, I would have twice as many copies without it.

Maybe someone can construct an empirical test of this phenomenon?

And #1 hit record or not, shouldn't this have come out in 2005?

From a Racetrack to The Cold War Near Home

2008-04-24T14:43:00.003-04:00

Funny how there are often amazing things around you, and you never notice until you trip over them. I was chatting with a colleague today about how one could improve the commute to Brookhaven from NYC, and I started looking at Google maps to see how close the LIRR tracks came to the lab (a man can dream about a new train station just where he wants it, right?). Then my network connection at home collapsed briefly (my mom is in town so I am telecommuting today), and I resorted to my ever-lovin' Google Maps Mobile on my Blackberry Curve (no iPhone for me, yet). And lo, what did I see there -- and not on the normal version -- but "Suffolk Meadow Race Track", just southwest of the lab. A little Googling got me to the interesting "Long Island Oddities" site, which has this neat article about the honest-to-god horserace track, which was open from 1977 to 1988.

But then I saw "NIKE Missile Base", which led to this piece about an honest-to-god anti-aircraft missle base in Rocky Point, about 7 miles North of the lab. From there, the research is straightforward, given all of the cold war buffs out there who seem to be keeping the Wiki pages complete. It seems the program ended in 1974, with the SALT I treaty, and now it's a ball field and low-income housing. That said, I'm still not absolutely sure the Nike missiles housed here were actually nuclear (although it was certainly an option for the Hercules), but I'm really staggered to hear about a missile site so close to home.

A Passover Talk

2008-04-21T10:02:00.004-04:00

Happy holidays, everyone. Hectic weekend, with two seders to attend -- one of them even assigning homework, to present to the other guests. Unable to resist the assignment, and unable to do anything without visuals, I found myself analyzing a passage from Exodus -- one about the covenant with Abraham, and how it is "remembered" by God just before the Exodus story gets rolling -- by means of a fairly ornate Keynote presentation. Most interestingly, I found a connection to a neat etching I saw recently by Roman Opalka, a French-Polish artist who seems to have a real thing for recursion. Anyway, have a look and let me know if you have any questions.

The Higgs @ RHIC?

2008-04-17T11:38:00.004-04:00

Now I know there are lots of connections between RHIC and the LHC, but finding the Higgs is not one of them. Maybe someone should mention this to the photo editor for this Canada.com story on the LHC?

Spiderwebs, Everywhere

2008-04-11T18:15:00.003-04:00

I've been writing all day, so the blogging is heavily on the visual side.

And I know I'm just seeing what I want here in a totally unrelated (but interesting looking) show, at a frustrating but interesting place, but weren't we just talking about spiderwebs?

Is This What Physicists Do on Wall Street?

2008-04-11T18:08:00.002-04:00

This looks more like a New Yorker cartoon contest than a New York Times editorial illustration.

Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web

2008-04-09T21:31:00.010-04:00

I swear I didn't make this up, and it's really a room-size set of connecting elastic rope segments by Tomas Saraceno at Tanya Bonakdar (way West 21st St), which are honestly meant to be imaginings of the early universe.

Investigating how the gossamer thin filaments of these intricate webs are able to suspend life by way of intricate geometry, Saraceno suggests at a conceptual architectural proposal that relies on this most delicate and prehistoric system of life to take us into our future. Of particular interest is the application of this phenomenon throughout the history of time. A keystone to Saraceno’s fascination with these web constructions was the recent discovery that suggests the early universe was a sponge-like form, with galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets on a spider's web.

I have to admit that it does a pretty good job evoking the images coming from dark matter simulations, where dark matter clumps up into filaments that sketch out a "spongy" structure. What I find neat is that these filaments, seen in galaxy surveys, are thought to reflect inhomogeneities from the very early universe, propagated over billions of years.

I also wonder how the sponge soaked up all the perfect fluid we've been studying these last few years. Ironically, one of these "sponge" images was also used in this 2005 article on RHIC.

But speaking of art, I also recently managed to catch a half an hour of the Poussin exhibit at the Met. Awesome. Poussin was a famously astute observer of nature, which clearly dominates these enormous tableaux. But beyond the obvious emphasis on the detailed imaginings of forests and mountains and lakes, out of which manmade cities seem to sprout, and little people frolic in the margins, he was apparently a real stickler for optics, as evinced by the precise rendering of the reflections in the water.

Examining Life

2008-04-07T21:31:00.010-04:00

Phew, a bruising weekend. But how great is this, for a Monday? Philosophy everywhere:

A NYtimes article about the resurgence in philosophy programs in US universities. I started out a philosophy major before mutating into a physicist, and I have never regretted it. To be somewhat glib, the experience with struggling with "big questions," even apparently unanswerable ones (e.g. life and death, soul vs. body, Sein und Zeit, the role of Geist in history, etc.), makes dealing with somewhat-answerable ones (the existence, and definition of the Quark Gluon Plasma) that much more satisfying.

Stanley Fish, remembering the rise of "French Theory in America" and the Culture Wars they inspired. I went to college in the 80's and lit theory was a temporary, but fascinating, stage in that aforementioned mutation. There's certainly a tension between the deconstructionist worldview (and its antecedents) and the "naive" (oy) scientific realist view most of us working scientist have to adopt (with some hardship, in my case) to stay sane -- as well as to write plausible accounts of our research. But when you notice that data never speaks for itself (even if we've all heard our colleagues claim that "the data say..." something or another, usually in support of their view of things), and that two different people can make equally consistent stories for data sets (until the decisive experiment arrives!) it's nice to know that you're not alone:
...[The] program of drawing closer and closer to a truth independent of our discursive practices, a truth that, if we are slow and patient in the Baconian manner, will reveal itself and come out from behind the representational curtain — is not, according to [the deconstructionist way of] thinking, realizable...That’s a loss, but it’s not a loss of anything in particular. It doesn’t take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it — one epistemology — has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked “What’s your epistemology?” you’ll give a different answer than you would have given before. The world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way.
And a statue of Aristotle has just arrived in Queens.

I always wonder if the life of the mind is under attack by the onslaught of media and the technology which delivers it. You see so many kids (and their parents) so focussed on keeping busy. But I always figure that the mind will eventually reclaim it's own (Word) as the busy generation starts to burn out and reflect a bit. Then again, maybe I'm still just a romantic -- from the Times:

Barry Loewer, the [Rutgers philosophy] department chairman, said that Rutgers started building its philosophy program in the late 1980s, when the field was branching into new research areas like cognitive science and becoming more interdisciplinary. He said that many students have double-majored in philosophy and, say, psychology or economics, in recent years, and go on to become doctors, lawyers, writers, investment bankers and even commodities traders.

As the approach has changed, philosophy has attracted students with little interest in contemplating the classical texts, or what is known as armchair philosophy. Some, like Ms. Onejeme, the pre-med-student-turned-philosopher, who is double majoring in political science, see it as a pre-law track because it emphasizes the verbal and logic skills prized by law schools — something the Rutgers department encourages by pointing out that their majors score high on the LSAT.

Other students said that studying philosophy, with its emphasis on the big questions and alternative points of view, provided good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology.

OK, philosophy as a means rather than an end. At least it's a start.

Wagner's Bona Fides [UPDATED]

2008-03-31T12:21:00.015-04:00

What really bothers me about this recent flap with the lawsuit to delay the start of the LHC is the way Walter Wagner claims to be a "nuclear physicist", and how some journalists feel compelled to take that claim seriously, at least in part (e.g. the Register, who otherwise goes to town on him, calls him a "sometime physicist", although the Times is more careful and avoids it).

Let's be blunt: if you want to even start to call yourself a nuclear physicist -- and by this I mean someone who actually understands what is known fundamental forces well enough to make meaningful predictions as to what they might do in unfortunate circumstances -- you might want to actually have authored a paper in the subject.

In his brief submitted to the Hawaiian court, Wagner claims to be "credited with discovery of a novel particle only previously theorized to exist, namely a magnetic monopole." But Stefan, from Backreaction, had a look at the original paper and pointed out that Wagner is only thanked "for assistance", and is manifestly not an author. The Time magazine piece about this putative discovery (thanks again, Stefan!) calls him a technical assistant, albeit one who got "credit for first spotting the monopole's track), along with another assistant, Julie Teague.

So let's continue to be blunt: being a technical assistant on an experiment where someone else tells you to look through a stack of emulsions, when you luck out and find something, does not make you 1) a nuclear physicist, or 2) even necessarily an author. While one could argue that doing work for an experiment would normally get you on the paper these days, clearly Wagner was below threshold even in his particle-discovering heyday.

In general, a paper's authors are not just the guys who "did the work", but those who take responsibility not just for being right about the results (which can happen by dumb luck) but for being wrong as well -- which can be fatal, unless you understand why you were wrong and make into something productive down the road. And being wrong is something Wagner doesn't seem ready for yet, about anything. I contrast his unwavering belief in his own bona fides with William Unruh, who made real contributions to the theoretical explorations of Hawking radiation (and whom I discussed in a recent post) that Wagner is so quick to dismiss (from the NYT piece):

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

So here is a person who is considered to be an expert on the subject, but who is comfortable enough with how the process works to consider that his theories might be wrong, although everything he knows about the known (i.e. experimental) facts of gravity, quantum mechanics, particle physics, astrophysics, etc. reassure him that he is most likely not. Ultimately, it's Wagner's self-generated certainty, based on purely negative evidence (e.g. "I might be right because you might be wrong"), that makes him the weaker party in this argument.

And for the record, the "Cosmic rays" Wikipedia entry was started in 2002, but Wagner's "discovery" was only posted on January 13, 2008 by an unnamed author (which turns out to be a dialup connection in Honolulu - just 'nslookup 4.248.7.153'!), just in time for his re-entry into the blogosphere.

And next up, I'll try and deal with the substance of the issue, which is tricky when there's not much information supporting or rejecting a hypothesis...

(UPDATE: Wagner replies to my assessment, which is based only my reading of the publication record.)

Baseball, Monte Carlo Style

2008-03-30T23:35:00.003-04:00

How fun is this?: a Monte Carlo study of the history of baseball done by two Cornell applied mathematicans, using historical statistics, player-by-player.
Then again, this is the first time anyone has tried this?

This is exactly what we do in particle physics when we're trying to see how well a measurement will work -- we "try" (i.e. simulate) the measurement many times (i.e. often way more times than we actually do the measurement), and see how often we hit or miss (which tells us the efficiency of the procedure). We also like to calculate the probability of something looking like our measurement, just by a chance fluctuation of our backgrounds (which tells the the "purity" of our data). Maybe Bob Adair should have thrown some physicists at understanding the relative importance of various landmarks baseball's history, instead of just looking at the equipment?...

More on the Doomsday Lawsuit

2008-03-30T15:10:00.002-04:00

Walter Wagner pointed out that my post and my opinion of him was too strongly worded, which I wrote in haste and so which I withdraw, so I thought I'd just quote a piece out of a Discover blog post, on the continuing story:

Prior to suing the LHC, Wagner had an accomplished past. The Register reveals that when he appeared (alongside a time-machine professor) on the “paranormal-matters talk show Coast to Coast (’America’s most fascinating overnight radio program’)” he claimed to have “discovered a novel particle in a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector, initially identified as a magnetic monopole.”

He may also be no stranger to lawsuits, The Register also noted, and is currently in a legal battle with the board of the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, which he founded. “According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.”

Slow News Day

2008-03-29T16:40:00.003-04:00

Getting up early to get to the circus today (we live down the street from Madison Square Garden), I managed to catch this peach on the NYT website front page:

Slow news day, I guess.

Math meets Physics

2008-03-28T11:49:00.004-04:00

I dropped by a interesting symposium yesterday at SUNY Stony Brook (a university near to Brookhaven, that is the academic partner of BSA, our management company), "The Stony Brook Dialogues in Mathematics and Physics: A Symposium in Honor of Chen Ning Yang and James H. Simons". It had a varied and interesting set of talks (none online yet, though) exploring the connections between mathematics and physics, by colleagues and friends of CN Yang (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, when Yang was 35[!]) and Jim Simons (former Chair of the USB Math department, and current president of Renaissance Technologies). That is to say, it was the highest wattage I've seen in a meeting in quite a while, with luminaries from pure math to string theory. And even speaking as an experimental physicist, albeit as one with a still-unread copy of Nakahara's "Geometry, Topology and Physics" on his office shelf, I found the talks quite fascinating. It was also a nice reminder that Simons is funding a major $60M center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook.

One forgets that mathematicans and physicists tend to discover and rediscover major findings in the other's territories, so it was nice to see a collegial set of friends reminiscing on some notable examples -- my favorite one being how the topology of 4 dimensional spaces can be determined using methods devised in the context of Yang-Mills field theories, while that of 3 dimensional spaces is done similarly, but using Chern-Simons theories. Of course, mere mortals like me have no way to put this to use, but you just never know when these things will reappear as something relevant to one's science.

I also took a few photos with my phone camera before the battery gave up: here's Cumrum Vafa's talk on "Strings on Geometry", which was illuminating, and animated.